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Late Monday, it came out that Oracle is one of the potential American acquirers of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance, after President Trump ordered Bytedance sell TikTok out of spite. Microsoft has been the most talked about potential purchaser, though there were also rumors of a potential bid by Twitter.The Oracle rumor strikes many as particularly bizarre, for good reason. Oracle is pretty much an enterprise-only focused company. However, if it has one strength it is in buying up companies and integrating them into its cashflow generation machine. I'm still not sure I see the synergies here, but perhaps Larry Ellison is finally realizing that Oracle is the opposite of cool in Silicon Valley.However, the thing that struck me most about all of this is that Oracle is one of the main companies behind the plot to undermine Section 230. Oracle has been a funder of a weird group of anti-Section 230 activists, and has been involved in multiple anti-Section 230 crusades. And, as we've pointed out in the past, it seems pretty clear why: Oracle has always been incredibly (to a petty level) jealous of Google and Facebook's success -- and seems to see Section 230 reform as a weapon it can use to attack those companies without harming itself, since Oracle doesn't really host much user generated content.Of course, that would change if Oracle actually ended up buying TikTok. Suddenly, it would have a massive platform full of user generated content, and it would be fascinating to watch if Oracle changes its tune on 230 (or calls off its attack dogs who keep misrepresenting 230). That would certainly be interesting. Of course, the general rumor is that Oracle is really just doing this to drive up the price for Microsoft (who Oracle is losing to in the fight for "cloud" supremacy), but President Trump has given his blessing for an Oracle/TikTok deal, which isn't too surprising, given that Oracle's top execs have been sucking up to Trump and praising him since he was elected.

Late Monday, it came out that Oracle is one of the potential American acquirers of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance, after President Trump ordered Bytedance sell TikTok out of spite. Microsoft has been the most talked about potential purchaser, though there were also rumors of a potential bid by Twitter.The Oracle rumor strikes many as particularly bizarre, for good reason. Oracle is pretty much an enterprise-only focused company. However, if it has one strength it is in buying up companies and integrating them into its cashflow generation machine. I'm still not sure I see the synergies here, but perhaps Larry Ellison is finally realizing that Oracle is the opposite of cool in Silicon Valley.However, the thing that struck me most about all of this is that Oracle is one of the main companies behind the plot to undermine Section 230. Oracle has been a funder of a weird group of anti-Section 230 activists, and has been involved in multiple anti-Section 230 crusades. And, as we've pointed out in the past, it seems pretty clear why: Oracle has always been incredibly (to a petty level) jealous of Google and Facebook's success -- and seems to see Section 230 reform as a weapon it can use to attack those companies without harming itself, since Oracle doesn't really host much user generated content.Of course, that would change if Oracle actually ended up buying TikTok. Suddenly, it would have a massive platform full of user generated content, and it would be fascinating to watch if Oracle changes its tune on 230 (or calls off its attack dogs who keep misrepresenting 230). That would certainly be interesting. Of course, the general rumor is that Oracle is really just doing this to drive up the price for Microsoft (who Oracle is losing to in the fight for "cloud" supremacy), but President Trump has given his blessing for an Oracle/TikTok deal, which isn't too surprising, given that Oracle's top execs have been sucking up to Trump and praising him since he was elected.

A coalition of cities has filed a desperate, and likely doomed, lawsuit (pdf) against streaming providers like Netflix and Disney. In it, the cities proclaim that they are somehow owed 5 percent of gross annual revenue. Why? Apparently they believe that because these streaming services travel over telecom networks that utilize the public right of way, they're somehow owed a cut:

Earlier this year we noted that the Australian government was setting up a you're-too-successful tax on Google and Facebook which it planned to hand over to media organizations. We should perhaps call it the "Welfare for Rupert Murdoch" tax, because that's what it is. Murdoch, of course, owns a huge share of media operations in Australia and has been demanding handouts from Google for years (showing that his claimed belief in the free market was always hogwash).In response, Google has now released an open letter to Australians pointing out that this plan to tax Google to funnel money to Murdoch will have massive unintended consequences. In particular, Google argues, under the law, Google would be required to give an unfair advantage to big media companies:

Readers here will be sick of this, but we're going to have to keep beating it into the general populace's head: trademark law is about preventing confusion as to the source of a good or service. The idea is to keep buyers from being fooled into buying stuff from one company or person while thinking they were buying it from another. That's basically it.It's a lesson still to be learned, and one which a federal judge has imparted on famed jewelry maker Tiffany & Co. The backstory here is that back in 2013, on Valentine's Day of all days, Tiffany & Co. sued Costco over the latter's advertisement of "Tiffany" style rings.

Washington DC responded to widespread protests following the killing of George Floyd with a set of police reforms that tried to address some systemic problems in the district's police department, starting with its lack of transparency and accountability.The reform bill -- passed two weeks after George Floyd's killing -- placed new limits on deadly force deployment, banned the Metropolitan PD from acquiring military equipment through the Defense Department's 1033 program, and mandated release of body-camera footage within 72 hours of any shooting by police officers. The names of the officers involved are covered by the same mandate, ensuring it won't take a lawsuit to get the PD to disclose info about officers deploying deadly force.But there's a lawsuit already in the mix -- one that hopes to keep the public separated from camera footage and officers' names. Unsurprisingly, it's been filed by a longtime opponent of police accountability.

This week we've got another cross-post, with the latest episode of The Neoliberal Podcast from the Progressive Policy Institute. Host Jeremiah Johnson invited Mike, along with PPI's Alec Stapp, to discuss everything about encryption: the concept itself, the attempts at laws and regulations, and more.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

ICE continues to not care what anyone thinks of it. Its tactics over the past few years have turned it into one of the federal government's most infamous monsters, thanks to its separation of families, caging of children, unfettered surveillance of undocumented immigrants, its fake university sting created to punish students trying to remain in the country legally, its sudden rescinding of COVID-related distance learning guidelines solely for the purpose of punishing students trying to remain in the country legally… well, you get the picture.Perhaps it's fitting ICE is buying tech from a company that appears unconcerned that most of the public hates it. Clearview -- the facial recognition software that matches uploaded facial images with billions of images scraped from the open web -- is one of the latest additions to ICE's surveillance tech arsenal.

The storm has passed and the charges have been dropped. But the fact that someone who tweeted about police behavior, and, worse, people who retweeted that tweet, were ever charged over it is an outrage, and to make sure that it never happens again, we need to talk about it. Because it stands as a cautionary tale about why First Amendment protections are so important – and, as we'll explain here, why Section 230 is as well.To recap, protester Kevin Alfaro became upset by a police officer's behavior at a recent Black Lives Matter protest in Nutley, NJ. The officer had obscured his identifying information, so Alfaro tweeted a photo asking if anyone could identify the officer "to hold him accountable."Several people, including Georgana Szisak, retweeted that tweet. The next thing they knew, Alfaro, Sziszak, and several other retweeters found themselves on the receiving end of a felony summons pressing charges of "cyber harassment" of the police officer.As we've already pointed out, the charges were as pointless as they were spurious, because they themselves directly did the unmasking of the officer's identity, which the charges maintained was somehow a crime to ask for. Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh took further issue with the prosecution, and in particular its application of the New Jersey cyber harassment statute against the tweet. Particularly in light of an earlier case, State v. Carroll (N.J. Super. Ct. App. Div. 2018), he took a dim view:

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Last week there was quite a lot of news paid to Apple kicking Fortnite out of the iOS app store for violating the rules by avoiding Apple's in-app payment setup (out of which Apple takes 30%). Epic, who had been hinting at this for a while, introduced a direct payment offering that effectively avoided the 30% charge that Apple (and Google) require from developers.There have been arguments over the last decade or so since Apple implemented its policy requiring subscription revenue to go through Apple's system -- but this is probably the biggest fight yet. Epic was clearly expecting Apple to do this because almost immediately after Fortnite was removed from the app store, Epic first released a Nineteen Eighty-Fortnite parody ad, mocking Apple's infamous 1984 Superbowl ad.Almost immediately, Epic also sued Apple over the removal in a legal complaint that was clearly prepared well in advance. Represented by some of the top antitrust lawyers in the country, and weighing in at 65 pages, Epic had spent some time preparing for this fight. To drive this point home, the lawsuit itself references 1984 in the opening paragraph, tying into Epic's marketing campaign:

While fifth-generation (5G) wireless will result in faster, more resilient networks (once it's finally deployed at scale years from now), the technology has been over-hyped to an almost comical degree. Yes, faster, lower latency networks are a good thing, but 5G is not as paradigm-rattling as most wireless carriers and hardware vendors have led many in the press to believe. 5G is more of a useful evolution than a revolution, but it has become the equivalent of magic pixie dust in tech policy circles, wherein if you simply say "it will lead to faster deployment of 5G!" you'll immediately add gravitas to your otherwise underwhelming K Street policy pitch.Here on planet Earth, most consumers couldn't care less about 5G. In most surveys U.S. consumers -- who pay some of the highest prices in the world for mobile data -- say their top priority is usually lower prices. That's increasingly true during a pandemic and economic crisis, where every dollar counts.Enter Verizon, which, instead of reading the market, has been repeatedly trying to charge $10 extra for 5G despite consumers not seeing the value. Verizon executives had fooled themselves into thinking a "premium" upgrade warranted a premium price tag. But consumers quickly realized the extra money simply wasn't worth it. For one, Verizon's network is barely available (one study stated a full 5G signal was available about 0.4% of the time). First generation 5G devices are also expensive and tend to suffer from crappier battery life. All for admittedly faster speeds most users don't think they need yet.With consumers not really that interested, and no other wireless carriers attempting to charge extra anyway, Verizon has been forced to finally back away from the $10 monthly surcharge after flirting with it since last year:

Eugene Volokh reports an Ohio court has hit a number of defendants in a libel lawsuit with an unconstitutional order forbidding them from posting the name of the man suing them. It's no ordinary man, though. It's a police officer who several attendees of a Cincinnati city council meeting have both identified and claimed used a racist hand sign while interacting with them.

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has touched most aspects of daily life. Education is obviously no exception, as the heated debates about whether students should return to school demonstrate. But another tricky issue is how school exams should be conducted. Back in May, Techdirt wrote about one approach: online testing, which brings with it its own challenges. Where online testing is not an option, other ways of evaluating students at key points in their educational career need to be found. In the UK, the key test is the GCE Advanced level, or A-level for short, taken in the year when students turn 18. Its grades are crucially important because they form the basis on which most university places are awarded in the UK.Since it was not possible to hold the exams as usual, and online testing was not an option either, the body responsible for running exams in the UK, Ofqual, turned to technology. It came up with an algorithm that could be used to predict a student's grades. The results of this high-tech approach have just been announced in England (other parts of the UK run their exams independently). It has not gone well. Large numbers of students have had their expected grades, as predicted by their teachers, downgraded, sometimes substantially. An analysis from one of the main UK educational associations has found that the downgrading is systematic: "the grades awarded to students this year were lower in all 41 subjects than they were for the average of the previous three years."Even worse, the downgrading turns out to have affected students in poorly performing schools, typically in socially deprived areas, the most, while schools that have historically done well, often in affluent areas, or privately funded, saw their students' grades improve over teachers' predictions. In other words, the algorithm perpetuates inequality, making it harder for brilliant students in poor schools or from deprived backgrounds to go to top universities. A detailed mathematical analysis by Tom SF Haines explains how this fiasco came about:

Multiple experts on Section 230 have pointed out that the NTIA's bizarre petition to the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is complete nonsense. Professor Eric Goldman's analysis is quite thorough in ripping the petition to shreds.

Google's on-again, off-again relationship with China is off again. A decade ago, Google threatened to pull out of China because the government demanded a censored search engine. Fast forward to 2018 and it was Google offering to build a censored search engine for the China market. A few months later -- following heavy internal and external criticism -- Google abandoned the project.China is now imposing its will on Hong Kong in violation of the agreement it made when the UK returned control of the region to the Chinese government. Its latest effort to stifle long-running pro-democracy demonstrations took the form of a "national security" law which was ratified by the far-too-obsequious Hong Kong government. The law equates advocating for a more independent Hong Kong with sedition and terrorism, allowing authorities to punish demonstrators and dissidents with life sentences for, apparently, fighting back against a government that agreed it wouldn't impose its will on Hong Kong and its residents.For years, Google has refused to honor data requests from the Chinese government. Following this latest attack on Hong Kong autonomy, it appears Google now feels the region is indistinguishable from China.

Paid advertising content should not be covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Online platforms should have the same legal risk for ads they run as print publishers do. This is a reform that I think supporters of Section 230 should support, in order to save it.Before I explain why I support this idea, I want to make sure I'm clear as to what the idea is. I am not proposing that platforms be liable for content they run ads next to -- just for the ads themselves. I am not proposing that the liability lies in the "tools" that they provide that can be used for unlawful purposes, that's a different argument. This is not about liability for providing a printing press, but for specific uses of the printing press -- that is --publication.I also don't suggest that platforms should lose Section 230 if they run ads at all, or some subset of ads like targeted ads, like a service-wide on/off switch. The liability would just be normal, common-law liability for the content of the ads themselves. And “ads” just means regular old ads, not all content that a platform commercially benefits from.It's fair to wonder whom this applies to. Many of the examples listed below have to do with Facebook selling ads that are displaying on Facebook, or Google placing ads on Google properties, and it's pretty obvious that these companies would be the ones facing increased legal exposure under this proposal. But the internet advertising ecosystem is fiendishly complex, and there are often many intermediaries between the advertiser itself, and the proprietor of the site the ad is displayed on.So at the outset, I would say that any and all of them could be potentially liable. If Section 230 doesn't apply to ads, it doesn't apply to supplying ads to others; in fact, these intermediary functions are considered a form of "publishing" under the common law. Which party to sue would be the plaintiff's choice, and there are existing legal doctrines that prevent double recovery, and to allow one losing defendant to bring in, or recover from, other responsible parties.It's important to note, too, that this is not strict or vicarious liability. In any given case, it could be that the advertiser could be found liable for defamation or some kind of fraud but the platform isn't, because the elements of the tort are met for one and not the other. Whether a given actor has the "scienter" or knowledge necessary to be liable for some offense has to be determined for each party separately -- you can impute the state of mind from one party onto another, and strict liability torts for speech offenses are, in fact, unconstitutional.The Origins Of An IdeaI first started thinking about it in the context of monetized content. After a certain dollar threshold is reached with monetized content, there should be liability for that, too, since the idea that YouTube can pay thousands of dollars a month to someone for their content but then have a legal shield for it simply doesn't make sense. The relationship of YouTube to a high-paid YouTuber is more similar to that between Netflix and a show producer, than it is between YouTube and your average YouTuber whose content is unlikely to have been reviewed by a live, human YouTube official. But monetized content is a marginal issue; very little of it is actionable, and frankly the most detestable internet figures don't seem to depend on it very much.But the same logic runs the other way, to when the content creator is paying a platform for publishing and distribution, instead of the platform paying the content creator. And I think eliminating 230 for ads would solve some real problems, while making some less-workable reform proposals unnecessary.Question zero should be: Why are ads covered by Section 230 to begin with? There are good policy justifications for Section 230 -- it makes it easier for there to be sites with a lot of user posts that don't need extensive vetting, and it gives sites a free hand in moderation. Great. It's hard to see what that has to do with ads, where there is a business relationship. Business should generally have some sense of whom they do business with, and it doesn't seem unreasonable for a platform to do quite a bit more screening of ads before it runs them than of tweets or vacation updates from users before it hosts them. In fact, I know that it's not an unreasonable expectation because the major platforms such as Google and Facebook already do subject ads to heightened screening.I know I'm arguing against the status quo, so I have the burden of persuasion. But in a vacuum, the baseline should be that ads don't get a special liability shield, just as in a vacuum, platforms in general don't get a liability shield. The baseline is normal common law liability and deviations from this are what have to be justified.I'm Aware That Much "Harmful" Content is not UnlawfulA lot of Section 230 reform ideas either miss the mark or are incompletely theorized, since, of course, much -- maybe even most -- harmful online content is not unlawful. If you sued a platform over it, without 230, you'd still lose, but it would take longer.You could easily counter that the threat of liability would cause platforms to invest more in content moderation overall, and I do think that this is likely true, it is also likely that such investments could lead to over moderation that limits free expression by speakers that are even considered mildly controversial.But with ads, there is a difference. Much speech that would be lawful in the normal case -- say, hate speech -- can be unlawful when it comes to housing and employment advertisements. Advertisements carry more restrictions and regulations in any number of ways. Finally, ads can be tortious in the standard ways as well: they can be fraudulent, defamatory, and so on. This is true of normal posts as well -- but with ads, there's a greater opportunity, and I would argue obligation, to pre-screen them.Many Advertisements Perpetuate HarmScam ads are a problem online. Google recently ran ads for scam fishing licenses, despite being told about the problem. People looking for health care information are being sent to lookalike sites instead of the site for the ACA. Facebook has even run ads for low-quality counterfeits and fake concert tickets. Instead of searching for a locksmith, you might as well set your money on fire and batter down your door. Ads trick seniors out of their savings into paying for precious metals. Fake customer support lines steal people's information -- and money. Malware is distributed through ads. Troublingly, internet users in need of real help are misdirected to fake "rehab clinics" or pregnancy "crisis centers" through ads.Examples of this kind are endless. Often, there is no way to track down the original fraudster. Currently, Section 230 allows platforms to escape most legal repercussions for enabling scams of this kind, while allowing the platforms to keep the revenue earned from spreading them.There are many more examples of harm, but the last category I'll talk about is discrimination, specifically through housing and employment discrimination. Such ads might be unlawful in terms of what they say, or even to whom they are shown. Putting racially discriminatory text in a job or housing ad can be discriminatory, and choosing to show a facially neutral ad to just certain racial groups could be, as well. (There are tough questions to answer -- surely buying employment ads on sites likely to be read by certain racial groups is not necessarily unlawful -- but, in the shadow of Section 230, there's really no way to know how to answer these questions.)In many cases under current law, there may be a path to liability in the case of racially discriminatory ads, or other harmful ads. Maybe you have a Roommates-style fact pattern where the platform is the co-creator of the unlawful content to begin with. Maybe you have a HomeAway fact pattern where you can attach liability to non-publisher activity that is related to user posts, such as transaction processing. Maybe you can find that providing tools that are prone to abuse is itself a violation of some duty of care, without attributing any responsibility for any particular act of misuse. All true, but each of these approaches only addresses a subset of harms and frankly seem to require some mental gymnastics and above-average lawyering. I don't want to dissuade people from taking these approaches, if warranted, but they don't seem like the best policy overall. By contrast, removing a liability shield from a category of content where there is a business relationship and a clear opportunity to review content prior to publication would incentivize platforms to more vigorously review.A Cleaner Way to Enforce Anti-Discrimination Law and Broadly Police HarmIt's common for good faith reformers to propose simply exempting civil rights or other areas of law from Section 230, preventing platforms from claiming Section 230 as a defense of any civil rights lawsuit, much as how federal criminal law is already exempted.The problem is that there is no end of good things that we'd like platforms to do more of. The EARN IT Act proposes to create more liability for platforms to address real harms, and SESTA/FOSTA likewise exempts certain categories of content. There are problems with this approach in terms of how you define what platforms should do, and what content is exempted, and issues of over-moderation in response to fears of liability. This approach threatens to make Section 230 a Swiss cheese statute where whether it applies to a given post requires a detailed legal analysis, which has other significant harms and consequences.Another common proposal is to exempt "political" ads from Section 230, or targeted ads in general (or to somehow tackle targeting in some non-230 way). There are just so many line-drawing problems here, making enforcement extremely difficult. How, exactly, do you define "targeted"? How, by looking at an ad, can you tell whether it is targeted, contextual, or just part of some broad display campaign? With political ads, how do you define what counts? Ads from or about campaigns are only a subset of political ads--is an ad about climate change "political"--or an ad from an energy company touting its green record? In the broadest sense yes, but it's hard to see how you'd legislate around this topic.Under the proposal to exempt ads from Section 230, the primary question to answer is not what is the content addressed to and what harms it may cause, but simply, whether it is an ad. Ads are typically labeled as such and quite distinct--and it may be the case that there need to be stronger ad disclosure requirements and penalties for running ads without disclosure. There may be other issues around boundary-drawing as well--I perfectly well understand that one of the perceived strengths of Section 230 is its simplicity, relative to complex and limited liability shields like Section 512 of the DMCA. Yet I think they're tractable.Protection for Small PublishersI've seen some publishers respond to user complaints of low-quality or even malware-distributing ads running on sites where the publishers point out that they don't see or control the ads--they are delivered straight from the ad network to the user, alongside publisher content. (I should say straight away that this still counts as "publishing" an ad--if the user's browser is infected by malware that inserts ads, or if an ISP or some other intermediary inserts the ad into the publisher's content, then no it is not liable, but if a website embeds code that serves ads from a third party, it is "publishing" that ad in the same sense as a back page ad on a fancy Conde Nast magazine. Whether that leads to liability just depends on whether the elements of the tort are met, and whether 230 applies, of course.)For major publishers I don't have a lot of sympathy. If their current ad stack lets bad ads slip through, they should use a different one, if they can, or demand changes in how their vendors operate. The incentives don't align for publishers and ad tech vendors to adopt a more responsible approach. Changing the law would do that.At the same time it may be true that some small publishers depend on ads delivered by third parties, and not only does the technology not allow them to take more ownership of ad content, they lack the leverage to demand to be given the right tools. Under this proposal, these small publishers would be treated like any other publisher for the most part, though I tend to think that it would be harder to meet the actual elements of an offense with respect to them. That said I would be on board with some kind of additional stipulation that ad tech vendors are required to defend and pay out for any case where publishers below a certain threshold are hauled into court for distributing ads they have no control over, but are financially dependent on. Additionally, to the extent that the ad tech marketplace is so concentrated that major vendors are able to shift liability away from themselves to less powerful players, antitrust and other regulatory intervention may be needed to assure that risks are borne by those who can best afford to prevent them.The Tradeoffs That Accompany This Idea Are Worth ItI am proposing to throw sand in the gears on online commerce and publishing, because I think the tradeoffs in terms of consumer protection and enforcing anti-discrimination laws are worth it. Ad rates might go up, platforms might be less profitable, ads might take longer to place, and self-serve ad platforms as we know them might go away. At the same time, fewer ads could mean less ad-tracking and an across-the-board change to the law around ads should not tilt the playing field towards big players any more than it already is, and would not likely lead to an overall decline in ad spending, just a shift in how those dollars are spent (to different sites, and to fewer but more expensive ads)..This proposal would burden some forms of speech more than others, too, so it’s worth considering First Amendment issues. One benefit of this proposal over subject matter-based proposals is that it is content neutral, applying to a business model. Commercial speech is already subject to greater regulation than other forms of speech, and this is hardly a regulation, just the failure to extend a benefit universally. Though of course this can be a different way of saying the same thing. But, if extending 230 to ads is required if it’s extended anywhere, it would seem that same logic would require that 230 be extended to print media or possibly even first-party speech. That cannot be the case. And I have to warn people that if proposed reforms to Section 230 are always argued to be unconstitutional, that makes outright repeal of 230 all the more likely, which is not an outcome I’d support.Fans of Section 230 should like this idea because it forestalls changes they no doubt think would be worse. Critics of 230 should like it because it addresses many of the problems they've complained about for years, and has few if any of the drawbacks of content-based proposals. So I think it's a good idea.John Bergmayer is Legal Director at Public Knowledge, specializing in telecommunications, media, internet, and intellectual property issues. He advocates for the public interest before courts and policymakers, and works to make sure that all stakeholders -- including ordinary citizens, artists, and technological innovators -- have a say in shaping emerging digital policies.

Earlier this year, the DOJ Inspector General released a report that -- surprise, surprise -- showed the FBI abusing its FISA privileges. The FBI had placed former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page under surveillance, suspecting (but only momentarily) that he was acting as an agent of a foreign power. (Guess which one.)The report said the first wiretap request might have been valid, but subsequent requests for extensions weren't. The Inspector General said the agency cherry-picked info to keep the wiretap alive, discarding any evidence it had come across that would have ended the surveillance.Even more damning, it found that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email from another federal agency to hide Carter Page's involvement with that agency from the FISA court. The FISA court demanded the DOJ hand over information on any other cases before it that Clinesmith might have had a hand in. But that wasn't the end of it. Clinesmith was also referred to the DOJ for criminal charges.The criminal charge has arrived. The criminal complaint [PDF] was filed in the DC federal district court. It details the email Clinesmith altered and submitted with the Carter Page surveillance extension request to the FISA court in 2017.The original email -- sent to Clinesmith by an unnamed government agency -- said that Page was an "operational source" for this agency. The "Other Government Agency" (OGA) stated this in the email to Clinesmith:

The Learning Apps Bundle is a hub of over 50 of the best educational apps for kids that makes learning fun and entertaining. These apps are aimed at kids of all ages from toddlers to teens. They offer apps for basics animal names and sounds, alphabets, and numbers, and up to complicated topics of math and physics. All these apps are interactive and easy to use. The bundle is on sale for $20.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

A week after issuing his first ridiculous executive order about TikTok, barring any transactions involving the company if it is still owned by ByteDance, President Trump decided he needed to issue a second executive order about TikTok, this one more directly ordering ByteDance to sell it. The authority used in this one is different. The first one was using the IEEPA, which is what Trump has used to claim "national security" reasons for imposing tariffs on China without Congressional approval. This time he's using 50 USC 4565, which allows the US treasury to block certain mergers, acquisitions and takeovers that might impact national security.Except, here Trump is using that in reverse. ByteDance bought Musical.ly (and made it TikTok) two years ago. Trump didn't raise a peep at the time. To turn around now, two years later, and pretend that he can order the deal unwound is just silly.Even if you don't trust ByteDance/TikTok, you should be absolutely concerned about this for multiple reasons: it's a clear and blatant abuse of power by the President. Allowing any President to just declare a foreign-owned company a problem and try to force it to sell to an American company is going to cause all sorts of long-term problems for the US. What's to stop foreign governments from doing the same to us? China is probably just itching to do something similar in retaliation. Second, to reach back two years and try to unwind a merger at this point based on this flimsy legal theory is just crazy as well. It's clear that this is nothing more than vindictiveness on the part of the President.If there are real security issues with TikTok, then there should be due process. There should be investigations and evidence. Not just a childish, narcissistic President suddenly declaring that an entire company must be sold.

To be very clear: American consumers don't like broadband usage caps. At all. Most Americans realize (either intellectually or on instinct) that monthly broadband usage caps and overage fees are little more than monopolistic cash grabs. They're confusing, frustrating price hikes on captive customers that accomplish absolutely none of their stated benefits. They don't actually help manage congestion, and they aren't about "fairness" -- since if fairness were a goal you'd have a lot of grandmothers paying $5-$10 a month for broadband because they only check their email twice a day.Enter U.S. cable giant Charter (Spectrum), which is currently in the middle of trying to get the FCC to kill the merger conditions applied as part of its 2015 $79 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks. Those conditions, among other things, required that Charter adhere to net neutrality (despite the fact that the GOP has since killed net neutrality rules), and avoid usage caps and overage fees. Both conditions had 7 year sunset clauses built in, and Charter, eager to begin jacking up U.S. broadband consumer prices ever higher, has been lobbying to have them killed two years early.Charter's lobbying tactics so far have included giving money to groups like the Boys and Girls Club in exchange for gushing support for the elimination of the merger conditions, despite the fact that doing so would harm these groups' constituents with higher prices.Charter's other major play apparently involves trying to tell the FCC that U.S. consumers really like monthly usage caps and annoying fees, restrictions the cable monopoly claims are "popular." From a filing (pdf) spotted by Ars Technica:

This week, our first place winner is Daydream with a comment digging into the details of a Michigan Supreme Court ruling that prevented an attempt to seize someone's house over an $8.41 debt:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, Google was in the news twice — first for their inevitable admission that Google+ was a failure, and then for their surprising announcement of the new corporate structure under the parent company Alphabet. Meanwhile, a CIA FOIA dump provided new information about spying on the Senate, including the accidental release of an apology letter the CIA wrote but never sent. We also saw more DMCA shenanigans as Vimeo complied with bogus mass-takedowns over the word "Pixels" and a convicted fraudster sent a bogus takedown to Techdirt over our coverage of previous bogus takedowns.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, RIM managed to work out a deal with the Saudi Arabian government to prevent a BlackBerry ban, raising the question of just what device security would be like under this new agreement. We saw some... questionable journalism choices as the Washington Post peddled anti-Craigslist ideas by citing one of its own anti-Craigslist advertisers, and the Associated Press was strangely not reporting on the judge denying sanctions in its lawsuit against Shepard Fairey. Meanwhile, we took a look at how the FBI was prioritizing copyright issues, Congress introduced yet another iteration of a disastrous fashion copyright bill, Viacom unsurprisingly appealed the YouTube ruling, and, in a major move to protect free speech, the anti-libel-tourism SPEECH Act became law.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, AOL was trying to regain some relevance by moving into the wireless space, while Blockbuster gave up on trying to beat Netflix on price by raising its online DVD rental prices to match. The FCC was subtly but significantly downgrading the concept of internet freedoms, one school was refusing to back down on felony charges against students over some harmless hacking, and an Australian ISP was threatening to sue a forum over public information. We also talked some more about the myth of copy protection as a useful idea, and wondered if some of the companies trying to foist it on people thought buyers were complete idiots.

We are living in truly dystopian times. As you may have heard, this week there have been a bunch of stories regarding the somewhat systematic dismantling of US Postal Service operations in what appears to be a coordinated effort by this administration to foil the process of sending and collecting mail-in ballots. But, apparently, rather than ensuring its own ability to handle mail-in ballots for this election, the US Postal service is trying to... patent blockchain-based voting?As you almost certainly know, President Trump has been -- without any factual basis at all -- decrying mail-in ballots, despite the fact that they have been proven safe and effective. As we're in the middle of a pandemic -- made significantly worse by this administration's own incompetence -- whose main mode of transmission is gathering indoors, the need for more mail-in ballots is obvious to anyone who cares about a functioning democracy. Instead, the President has apparently focused on making it impossible. While that seemed like a conspiracy theory to many, he admitted he was holding up funding for exactly that reason:

Summary: After an investigation by BuzzFeed uncovered several accounts trafficking in paid access to "decks" -- Tweetdeck accounts from which buyers could mass-retweet their own tweets to make them go "viral" -- Twitter acted to shut down the abusive accounts.Most of the accounts were run by teens who leveraged the tools provided by Twitter-owned Tweetdeck to provide mass exposure to tweets for paying customers. Until Twitter acted, users who saw their tweets go viral under other users' names tried to police the problem by naming paid accounts and putting them on blocklists.Twitter's Rules expressly forbid users from "artificially inflating account interactions”. But most accounts were apparently removed under Twitter's anti-spam policy -- one it beefed up after BuzzFeed published its investigation. The biggest change was the removal of the ability to simultaneously retweet tweets from several different accounts, rendering these "decks" built by "Tweetdeckers" mostly useless. Tweetdeckers responded by taking a manual approach to faux virality, sending direct messages requesting mutual retweets of posted content.Unlike other corrective actions taken by Twitter in response to mass abuse, this cleanup process appears to have resulted in almost no collateral damage. Some users complained their follower counts had dropped, but this was likely the result of near-simultaneous moderation efforts targeting bot accounts.Decisions to be made by Twitter:

Clearview -- the facial recognition company selling law enforcement agencies (and others) access to billions of photos and personal info scraped from the web -- is facing lawsuits over its business model, which appears to violate some states' data privacy laws. It's also been hit with cease-and-desist requests from a number of companies whose data has been scraped.What was once a toy for billionaires has become a toy for cops, who are encouraged to test out the software by running searches on friends and family members. Clearview claims it's been instrumental in fighting crime, but evidence of this remains nonexistent.Now, the company appears to be going on the offensive. Clearview has already argued -- through its legal rep, Tor Ekelund -- that Section 230 of the CDA insulates it against lawsuits over its use of third-party content. It's a novel argument, considering Clearview isn't actually the third party. That would be the original hosts of the content. Clearview is something else and it's not clear Section 230 applies to these lawsuits, which are about what Clearview does with the content, rather than over the content itself.The New York Times reports Clearview has hired a prominent First Amendment lawyer -- one that has defended the paper in the past -- to make the argument that selling government agencies data scraped from the web is protected speech.

Conservative criticism of social media content moderation is often characterized by misinformation and unfounded allegations. Factually unsupported assertions that federal law requires firms such as Facebook and Twitter to choose whether they are “platforms” and “publishers” — and dubious claims that “Big Tech” is engaged in a concerted anti-conservative campaign are prominent — but they’re not the most interesting feature of the present content moderation debate.More interesting is the lack of imagination that seems to dominate the discourse. Rather than exploring different content moderation regimes, conservatives have focused on shaping the rules of established companies through regulation and legislation. The ironic result of this narrow thinking could be the entrenchment of market incumbents.Conservative complaints about Silicon Valley censorship are often based on poor methodological study and collections of anecdotes. Although conclusive evidence that Silicon Valley is engaged in an anti-conservative campaign is lacking, many Republican lawmakers have used claims of bias as the basis for legislative proposals that would radically change how the Internet is regulated and governed.Conservative critics of the most prominent social media companies are correct to note that content moderation at Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (owned by Google) is centralized, with human content moderators and machine learning tools tasked with implementing a single governing set of content guidelines. This centralized system is far from perfect, and in an environment where Twitter users post half a billion tweets a day and YouTube account holders upload about 500 hours of video a minute false positives and false negatives should be expected.In addition, speech intended for specific audiences may be misunderstood by moderators from different backgrounds, but at scale, firms simply lack the time or resources to provide boutique, culturally-aware governance.Centralized content moderation also suffers from a perceived lack of transparency and process, with Silicon Valley behemoths considered by many to be secretive, distant institutions with few incentives to care about an individual case when their empires include millions or billions.Republican responses to allegations of political bias have focused on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that shields owners of interactive computer services such as social media companies, newspaper comments sections, university and library websites, and others from being held liable for the vast majority of content posted by third party users.A separate post would be required to dissect every Republican Section 230 proposal, but it is fair to say that most take aim at Section 230 with the intent of reforming social media companies’ content moderation rules. Proposals include conditioning Section 230 protections on “politically neutral” content moderation policies.But while the modern debate on social media has focused on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other household name companies, Republican lawmakers should remember that the centralized content moderation model is not a necessary feature of social media and that there are other models that offer solutions “big tech” critics across the political spectrum seek.Although not household names, there are social media services that implement more permissive content moderation policies. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are hardly alone in the social media universe. The Internet is full of social media sites. Indeed, some of these sites – such as Gab and Parler – emerged as centralized alternatives to Twitter, with their creators citing concerns about big tech bias.There are social media sites that reject centralization altogether. Mastodon is an example of a social media service that embraces a governance structure very different from those seen in big tech social media. It is open source and allows users to host their own nodes.Diaspora is another social media service that rejects the centralized governance of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. It is a non-profit and based on the principles of decentralization, privacy, and freedom to alter and tweak source code. There are also LBRY and the InterPlanetary File System; peer-to-peer decentralized protocols that allow users to share content absent any central governing authority.Conservatives who want a social media service where they can form their own communities, find like-minded users, and build content moderation rules consistent with their values have plenty of options available.Nonetheless, conservatives concerned about big tech bias seem unaware of the plethora of options available. It has never been easier for conservatives to build their own communities, share ideas, and seek to convince others of their ideology. Sadly, rather than embrace competition and innovation, many conservative activists and lawmakers have turned to government.The risks are difficult to overstate. Powerful market incumbents may oppose regulation, but once the writing is on the wall, they will take steps to ensure that they, and not smaller competitors, are able to comply with new regulations. The result will be the entrenchment of the companies conservative activists criticize. When conservative lawmakers and activists claim that Section 230 is a big tech subsidy, they are engaged in misleading rhetoric that is precisely the opposite of the truth. If anything, Section 230 should be considered a subsidy for big tech competitors. It ensures that they do not need to hire teams of lawmakers, saving them startup costs.An unintended consequence of Section 230 reforms and legislation motivated by weak claims of anti-conservative bias could be big tech getting bigger, with Facebook, Google, and Twitter continuing to dominate American speech online.We are still in the early years of online speech, yet activists and lawmakers seem to have forgotten much of its short history. Firms that at one time seem to dominate online speech, online search, and online entertainment have been displaced in the past. AskJeeves, AOL instant messenger, MySpace, and many others have fallen into obscurity or disappeared altogether. Facebook, Twitter, and Google may be dominant today, but their continued success is not an axiom of history.Conservatives convinced of big tech’s anti-conservative bias ought to consider the numerous platforms and competing content moderation models available. The future of online speech does not have to be centralized and dominated by a handful of firms, but continued calls for regulation in the name of content moderation risks further empowering market incumbents.Matthew Feeney is the director of Cato’s Project on Emerging Technologies, where he works on issues concerning the intersection of new technologies and civil liberties. Before coming to Cato, Matthew worked at Reason magazine as assistant editor of Reason​.com. He has also worked at The American Conservative, the Liberal Democrats, and the Institute of Economic Affairs. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, HuffPost, The Hill, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Examiner, City A.M., and others. He also contributed a chapter to libertarianism.org’s Visions of Liberty. Matthew received both his B.A and M.A in philosophy from the University of Reading.

Back in June, we wrote about how a judge had sided with Twitter in the very first of Rep. Devin Nunes' long series of frivolous SLAPP suits, saying that the company was clearly protected from lawsuit by Section 230 and that it did not need to reveal the identity of the two satirical Twitter accounts who had mocked Devin Nunes so mercilessly that he decided to ignore his oath to protect the Constitution (which, last I checked, still includes the 1st Amendment) and sued.Some assumed that this was the end of the lawsuit. It was not. First of all, the lawsuit against the two satirical accounts (one claiming to be Devin Nunes' cow and one claiming to be Devin Nunes' Mom) along with political consultant Liz Mair, were still alive and kicking unfortunately. But also, Nunes is still attempting to bring Twitter back into the case. He has filed a proposed amended complaint that his lawyer -- the ever ridiculous Steven Biss -- argues should get around Section 230 and make Twitter a party to the lawsuit. And... just as I originally finished writing this story, Judge John Marshall rejected that attempt. At around the same time, Liz Mair has filed her attempt to get the case against her dismissed in both this case, as well as in the second case Nunes filed against her.Let's start by looking at the proposed amended complaint. As "amended complaints" go, following a judge completely dismantling your legal arguments, this is... not very amended. Indeed, I scrolled through both the original and the amended complaint and they appear to be identical, page for page (if there are any changes, they are so minor as to be cosmetic, and I couldn't see any), right up until the very, very end. While the original complaint had five claims (negligence, defamation per se, insulting words, common law conspiracy, and injunction), the new one has... six. After it includes the identical (as far as I can tell) first five claims, it adds in a sixth: "aiding and abetting." This is Biss's weak ass attempt to bring Twitter back into the case and get around Section 230:

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Lately so many of our copyright trolling stories have been about Richard Liebowitz or Mathew Higbee, but we shouldn't forget about Malibu Media, which is still out there doing Malibu Media things. The latest, to come out of a court in Connecticut is that the infamous copyright troll has had a default judgment request denied. This is exceptionally rare.Default judgments are what you get when the other side doesn't even bother to show up. They're almost always granted as a matter of course (though, collecting on a default judgment is not always so easy). However, in this case US District Court judge Jeffrey Meyer isn't buying what Malibu Media is selling. Judge Meyer jumps right in and points out how unfair it is to blame the ISP account holder for actions that may have been done by someone else:

As we've noted a few times, the Trump administration's repeal of net neutrality did a lot more than just kill net neutrality rules. It effectively neutered the FCC's ability to hold giant broadband providers accountable for much of anything, from attempting to charge customers a rental fee for hardware they own, to the litany of bogus fees ISPs use to falsely inflate their advertised rates. So when a select group of folks try to claim that "killing net neutrality must not have mattered because the internet still works," they're advertising their ignorance.Another problematic aspect of the FCC's net neutrality repeal was that it also attempted to ban states from protecting consumers. The goal of the telecom sector, if you haven't noticed, is a complete and total oversight vacuum of one of the least competitive, and most disliked, business sectors in America. And it's fairly shocking how far along they've gotten in their quest without more people generally pointing out it's kind of a bad idea to let the Comcasts and AT&Ts of the world run amok sans regulator oversight or meaningful competition.Unfortunately for the telecom sector, its quest to block states from filling the consumer protection void hasn't gone that well. The courts so far have generally ruled that the FCC can't abdicate its authority over consumer protection, then turn around and try to dictate what states can or can't do. That's not stopping the Trump administration or telecom giants, which have continued their lawsuits against states like California on a state by state basis. Last week, the DOJ and ISPs filed amended complaints in California in a bid to scuttle that state's net neutrality rules:

In a little over 15 years, DHS agencies interacted with millions of travelers passing through our nation's airports… and relieved them of over $2 billion in cash. (And that's just agencies like the CBP and ICE. The DEA also lifts cash from airline passengers -- something it loves doing so much it hires TSA agents to look for money, rather than stuff that could threaten transportation security.)That's just one of several disturbing findings in the Institute for Justice's (IJ) new report [PDF] on the DHS's ability to separate travelers from their money. Utilizing the Treasury Department's forfeiture database, the IJ discovered the DHS is a fan of taking cash and does so more frequently at certain airports. The most popular airport for cash seizures is, by far, Chicago's O'Hare. In 2014, the airport accounted for 34% of all cash seized despite handling only 6% of all air travelers.More travelers means more opportunities, which explains some of the increase in seizures over the past decade. But as the IJ points out, seizures are outpacing the bump in travel stats.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows how much I both love and rely on profanity. Love, because profane language is precisely the sort of color the world needs more of. Rely on, because I use certain profane words the way most people use commas. So, when the courts decided that even the most profane words could be used in trademarks, I applauded. Fucks were literally given.But not every piece of profanity deserves a trademark. And, while I again applaud Boston University's decision to create a profane slogan around COVID-19 safety awareness for its student body, why in the actual fuck did the slogan have to be trademarked?First, the context:

Richard Liebowitz appears to be in trouble with a judge yet again. Judge Lewis Kaplan has issued quite an order in one of Liebowitz's thousands of cases -- Chosen Figure LLC v. Smiley Miley -- asking for proof that the plaintiff actually knows it's a client of Richard Liebowitz. The judge seems quite aware of Liebowitz's reputation:

The Nutley, New Jersey Police Department fears for the safety of its officer. It fears so much it tried to bring criminal charges against people who retweeted a tweet asking Twitter users to identify an officer who was policing a protest. Georgana Sziszak is one of the five people charged for interacting with the tweet, as Adi Robertson reports for The Verge.

Even before COVID-19, the brick and mortar movie industry was already struggling to adapt in the face of technological evolution. Now with a pandemic demolishing theater attendance, companies like AMC Theaters face an accelerated timeline as they attempt to cling to outdated constructs like movie release windows, sticky floors, and seventeen dollar popcorn, which were already showing their age in the 4K streaming era.Theater chains haven't exactly been handling this pandemic thing all that well. When Comcast Universal began sending its movies straight to home streaming (you know, given that people don't want to die), AMC Theaters CEO Adam Aron threw an apoplectic fit, insisting his chain would never again show a Comcast/Universal movie. After apparently realizing he didn't have any leverage to make those kinds of threats -- and negotiating to get an unspecified cut of the proceeds -- Aron and AMC agreed to a shorter 17-day release window. Baby steps, I guess.It should go without saying that the scientific consensus is that the pandemic isn't going anywhere, and the problems it's creating are very likely to get worse as it collides with the traditional flu season this fall. Like so many who think they can just bull rush through factual reality and scientific consensus, AMC seems intent on opening a good chunk of its traditional theaters next week, and is hoping to draw crowds by offering 15 cent movie tickets on the first day:

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Last year we had a detailed post about judge Lucy Koh's district court ruling that outlined exactly how Qualcomm abused its patents in an anticompetitive way to shake down the entire mobile phone industry for decades. This was in a case that was brought by the FTC and it was a stunning ruling on multiple accounts. First, it's rare for a court to recognize how patents and copyrights grant monopoly rights that can be abused in violation of antitrust rules. Second, it exposed a stunning degree of anticompetitive behavior on the part of Qualcomm.Unfortunately, this week, the 9th Circuit overturned that ruling, though did so in a somewhat confused manner. Indeed, this ruling may significantly limit any kind of antitrust activity (at least in the 9th Circuit).There are a lot of details, but the key element at stake was Qualcomm's "no license, no chips" rules. No company could buy Qualcomm chips, which were necessary for mobile devices, without licensing Qualcomm's entire patent portfolio. This snippet from the lower court ruling gives you the basics:

This may be shocking to hear, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The "$15 TV service" the company repeatedly hyped as a byproduct of the deal? Already discontinued. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.AT&T has laid off 41,000 employees just since it received its 2017, $42 billion tax cut from the Trump administration for doing absolutely nothing (technically, less than nothing, since it fired countless employees and trimmed 2020 CAPEX by around $3 billion). And this week, the company laid off another 600 employees across Time Warner, including employees at HBO and DC Comics:

The CBP is going to continue fishing in people's devices, despite federal courts (including the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals) telling it that suspicionless device searches are unconstitutional. The agency will just have to come up with something approximating suspicion to do it. Its latest Privacy Impact Assessment of its border device search policy gives it plenty of options for continuing its practice of performing deep dives into devices it encounters.

Even when facial recognition software works well, it still performs pretty poorly. When algorithms aren't generating false positives, they're acting on the biases programmed into them, making it far more likely for minorities to be misidentified by the software.The better the image quality, the better the search results. The use of a low-quality image pulled from a store security camera resulted in the arrest of the wrong person in Detroit, Michigan. The use of another image with the same software -- one that didn't show the distinctive arm tattoos of the non-perp hauled in by Detroit police -- resulted in another bogus arrest by the same department.In both cases, the department swore the facial recognition software was only part of the equation. The software used by Michigan law enforcement warns investigators search results should not be used as sole probable cause for someone's arrest, but the additional steps taken by investigators (which were minimal) still didn't prevent the arrests from happening.That's the same claim made by Las Vegas law enforcement: facial recognition search results are merely leads, rather than probable cause. As is the case everywhere law enforcement uses this tech, low-quality input images are common. Investigating crimes means utilizing security camera footage, which utilizes cameras far less powerful than the multi-megapixel cameras found on everyone's phones. The Las Vegas Metro Police Department relied on low-quality images for many of its facial recognition searches, documents obtained by Motherboard show.

Summary:Creating family friendly environments on the internet presents some interesting challenges that highlight the trade-offs in content moderation. One of the founders of Electric Communities, a pioneer in early online communities, gave a detailed overview of the difficulties in trying to build such a virtual world for Disney that included chat functionality. He described being brought in by Disney alongside someone from a kids’ software company, Knowledge Adventure, who had built an online community in the mid-90s called “KA-Worlds.” Disney wanted to build a virtual community space, HercWorld, to go along with the movie Hercules. After reviewing Disney’s requirements for an online community, they realized chat would be next to impossible:

Well, that didn't take long. We had just been discussing how the Paulding County School District had suspended a student for taking a photo of packed hallways filled with kids not wearing masks on the first day back to school a week or so ago. While the school mumbled something about the suspension being for using a phone without permission at school, the school also said the quiet part out loud over the intercom when it informed students that any social media activity that made the school look bad would result in "consequences." In case it wasn't already clear, that is blatantly unconstitutional, violating the students' First Amendment rights.In the least shocking news ever, the district has since reversed that suspension.

Every person in Myanmar above the age of 10 has lived part, if not most, of their life under a military dictatorship characterized by an obsession with achieving autonomy from international influences. Before the economic and political reforms of the past decade, Myanmar was one of the most isolated nations in the world. The digital revolution that has reshaped nearly every aspect of human life over the past half-century was something the average Myanmar person had no personal experience with.Recent reforms brought an explosion of high hopes and technological access, and Myanmar underwent a digital leapfrog, with internet access jumping from nearly zero percent in 2015 to over 40 percent in 2020. At 27-years-old, I remember living in a Yangon where having a refrigerator was considered high tech, and now, there are 10-year-olds making videos on Tik Tok.Everyone was excited for Myanmar's digital revolution to spur the economic and social changes needed to transform the country from a pariah state into the next economic frontier. Tourists, development aid, and economic investment poured into the country. The cost of SIM cards dropped from around 1,000 US dollars in 2013 to a little over 1 dollar today.This dramatic price drop was paired with a glut of relatively affordable smartphones and phone carriers that provided data packages that made social media platforms like Facebook free, or nearly free, to use. This led to the current situation where about 21 million out of the 22 million people using the internet are on Facebook. Facebook became the main conduit through which people accessed the internet, and now is used for nearly every online activity from selling livestock, watching porn, reading the news, to discussing politics.Then, following the exodus of over 700,000 Rohingya people from Myanmar’s war-torn Rakhine State, Facebook was accused of enabling a genocide.The ongoing civil wars in the country and the state violence against the Rohingya, characterized by the UN as ethnic cleansing with genocidal intent, put a spotlight on the potential for harm brought on by digital connectivity. Given its market dominance, Facebook has faced great scrutiny in Myanmar for the role social media has played in normalizing, promoting, and facilitating violence against minority groups.Facebook was, and continues to be, the favored tool for disseminating hate speech and misinformation against the Rohingya people, Muslims in general, and other marginalized communities. Despite repeated warnings from civil society organizations in the country, Facebook failed to address the new challenges with the urgency and level of resources needed during the Rohingya crisis, and failed to even enforce its own community standards in many cases.To be sure, there have been improvements in recent years, with the social media giant appointing a Myanmar focused team, expanding their number of Myanmar language content reviewers, adding minority language content reviewers, establishing more regular contact with civil society, and devoting resources and tools focused on limiting disinformation during Myanmar’s upcoming election. The company also removed the accounts of Myanmar military officials and dozens of pages on Facebook and Instagram linked to the military for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior." The company defines "inauthentic behavior" as "engag[ing] in behaviors designed to enable other violations under our Community Standards," through tactics such as the use of fake accounts and bots.Recognizing the seriousness of this issue, everyone from the EU to telecommunications companies to civil society organizations have poured resources into digital literacy programs, anti-hate-speech campaigns, social media monitoring, and advocacy to try and address this issue. Overall, the focus of much of this programming is on what Myanmar and the people of Myanmar lack—rule of law, laws protecting free speech, digital literacy, knowledge of what constitutes hate speech, and resources to fund and execute the programming that is needed.In the frenzy of the desperate firefighting by organizations on the ground, less attention has been given to larger systemic issues that are contributing to the fire.There is a need to pay greater attention to those coordinated groups that are working to spread conspiracy theories, false information, and hatred to understand who they are, who is funding them, and how their work can be disrupted—and, if necessary, penalized.There is a need to reevaluate how social media platforms are designed in a way that incentivizes and rewards bad behavior.There is also a need to question how much blame we want to assign to social media companies, and whether it is to the overall good to give them the responsibility, and therefore power, to determine what is and isn't acceptable speech.Finally, there is a need to ask ourselves about alternatives we can build, when many governments have proven themselves more than willing to surveil and prosecute netizens under the guise of health, security, and penalizing hate speech.It is dangerous to expect private, profit-driven multinational corporations to be given the power to draw the line between hate speech and free speech. Just as it is dangerous to give that same power to governments, especially in this time of rising ethno-nationalistic sentiments around the globe and the increasing willingness of governments to overtly and covertly gather as much data as possible to use against those they govern. We can see from the ongoing legal proceedings against Myanmar in international courts regarding the Rohingya and other ethnic minorities, and statements from UN investigative bodies on Myanmar that Facebook has failed release to them evidence of serious international crimes, that neither company policies nor national laws are enough to ensure safety, justice, and dignity for vulnerable populations.The solution to all this, as unsexy as it sounds, is a multifaceted, multi-stakeholder, long-term effort to build strong legal and cultural institutions that disperses the power and the responsibility to create and maintain safe and inclusive online spaces between governments, individuals, the private sector, and civil society.Aye Min Thant is the Tech for Peace Manager at Phandeeyar, an innovation lab which promotes safer and more inclusive digital spaces in Myanmar. Formerly, she was a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who covered business, politics, and ethno-religious conflicts in Myanmar for Reuters. You can follow her on Twitter @ma_ayeminthant.This article was developed as part of a series of papers by the Wikimedia/Yale Law School Initiative on Intermediaries and Information to capture perspectives on the global impacts of online platforms’ content moderation decisions. You can read all of the articles in the series here, or on their Twitter feed @YaleISP_WIII.

Last year we wrote about what we called the "dumbest gotcha story of the week," involving the music annotation site Genius claiming that Google had "stolen" its lyrics. The only interesting thing about the story is that Genius had tried to effectively watermark its version of the lyrics by using some smart apostrophes and some regular apostrophes. However, as we noted, the evidence that Google "copied" Genius just wasn't supported by the facts -- and even if they had copied Genius, it's unclear how that would violate any law. You can read that post for more details, but the simple fact is that a bunch of sites all license lyrics and have permission for them -- and many use a third party such as LyricFind to supply the lyrics. But how those lyrics are created is... however possible. Even as sites "license" lyrics from publishing companies, those companies themselves don't have their own lyrics. So basically lyric databases are created however possible -- including having people jot down what they think lyrics are... or by copying other sites that are doing the same. And there's nothing illegal about any of that.And yet, for reasons that are beyond me, last December, Genius sued both Google and LyricFind over this. As we noted at the time, it was one of the dumbest lawsuits we'd seen in a while, and it would easily fail. And that is exactly what has happened. The lawsuit was removed from NY state court to federal court, and while Genius tried to send it back, the judge not only rejected that request, but she dismissed the entire lawsuit for failure to state a claim (that's legal talk for "wtf are you even suing over, that doesn't violate any law, go home.")There were a bunch of issues that Genius tried to raise, but all of them were pretend issues. As we noted all along, Genius has no copyright interest in the lyrics (indeed, it has to license them too -- and, amusingly, in its early days, songwriters accused Genius of being a "pirate" site for not licensing those lyrics...). And so Genius tried to make a bunch of claims without arguing any copyright interest, but these were all really attempted copyright claims in disguise, and the court rightly pointed out that copyright pre-empts all of them.Breach of contract? Nah, copyright pre-empt's that:

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You probably didn't notice it, but there are currently no third-party ads on Techdirt. We pulled them down late last week, after it became impossible to keep them on the site, thanks to some content moderation choices by Google. In some ways, this is yet another example of the impossibility of content moderation at scale. If we didn't know and understand how impossible content moderation at scale is to do well, we might be like The Federalist and pretend that Google's content moderation decisions were based on disagreement with our ideology. That would have allowed us to make a fake story like the one that is still getting news cycles, thanks to idiots in Congress insisting that Google defunded the Federalist because of its ideological viewpoints.The truth is that Google's AdSense (its third-party ad platform) content moderation just sucks. In those earlier posts about The Federalist's situation, we mentioned that tons of websites deal with those "policy violation" notices from Google all the time. Two weeks ago, it went into overdrive for us: we started receiving policy violation notices at least once a day, and frequently multiple times per day. Every time, the message was the same, telling us we had violated their policies (they don't say which ones) and we had to log in to our "AdSense Policy Center" to find out what the problem was. Every day for the ensuing week and a half (until we pulled the ads down), we would get more of these notices, and every time we'd log in to the Policy Center, we'd get an ever rotating list of "violations." But there was never much info to explain what the violation was. Sometimes it was "URL not found" (which seems to say more about AdSense's shit crawler than us). Sometimes it was "dangerous and derogatory content." Sometimes it was "shocking content."But that would be about it. One difference, however, was that in the past Google would say that we didn't need to fix those flagged URLs and that they would just stop showing ads on those pages. Which is fine. They don't want their ads appearing there, no problem. But, many of these new "policy violations" said they were "must fix" issues. But what that "fix" sould be was never explained. Incredibly, this included a non-existent URL (a malformed URL that would just take you to the front page of Techdirt). That was deemed "must fix." Also, somewhat amusingly, the tag page for Google was deemed "dangerous or derogatory" and "must fix":Same with the tag page for "content moderation." I only wish I were joking:Again, what you see there was basically all of the information given to us. How do we "fix" that? Who the fuck knows? Again, I do not think that this is Google targeting us for our views (even when we have been critical of Google or Google's content moderation practices). It just seems to be that content moderation is impossible to do well, and Google is a prime example.Incredibly, this list of problematic URLs would just keep changing. Some would drop off the list with no explanation (even the "must fix" ones). Some new ones would be added. Some would switch between "must fix" and "don't need to fix." No explanation. No record of the "fixes." As an example, on Friday July 31st, I logged in and saw 25 URLs deemed to be policy violations. On Saturday morning I logged in and it was down to 18. No reason. Sunday morning it was at 22. But Sunday evening it was 27.I tried to reach out to people at AdSense to figure out what the hell we should do and did not get back anything useful.Three other things happened around this time as well. First, on the same day we started receiving these daily (or multiple times daily) policy violation emails, Google also started claiming that our daily emails (which are just snapshots of the blog itself) were phishing attempts, and automatically deleting them from any G Suite user's email account:For users of Gmail (not G Suite) it just moved our newsletters to spam, still claiming they were phishing attempts:Again, the emails don't ask users to do anything or to log in to anything. They're not phishing. They're just an email version of the day's blog posts. We didn't see how these two things (the AdSense violations and the accusations of "phishing") could possibly be connected, so it might just be a coincidence that they started the exact same day -- but, again, who knows?The next thing that happened was that the company we work with to manage the ad flow on our website (and to bring in other sources, beyond Google ads) told us that Google had reached out to them (not us) to say that because of all of the ongoing unfixed "policy" violations, we would be kicked out of AdSense by the end of August. Also, Google told them that we were engaging in "clickspam" by hiding our ads to make them look like regular content, and that needed to be fixed immediately. The problem is -- we don't do that and have never done that. Our ads were always in the right hand column and clearly called out as ads. Indeed, we pay attention to what other sites do, and we are way, way, way, way more careful than basically every other website on the planet when it comes to not shoving our ads where they might be mistaken as organic content.Finally, we started receiving reports from multiple Techdirt visitors (including those who told us they had purposefully whitelisted Techdirt from their ad blockers) that ads being delivered by Google were causing their computers to run hot. Multiple reports of ads on Techdirt failing to load properly, and causing Techdirt to fail to load properly. And also causing fans to turn on. And, to be honest, that's the last straw for us. We would try to work with Google to understand why our content is so problematic for it, but when Google's products start harming our users and causing a nuisance for them, that's when they've got to go.Given all this, we just decided that we're pulling the ads off the site entirely for the time being -- at least until we can figure out a better situation. This (obviously) represents a revenue hit for us, but the situation had become impossible to deal with. I was wasting so much time the past few weeks trying to figure out what the hell we were supposed to do, as opposed to doing the work I needed to be doing. So, that's it for now. We're looking at other providers out there, but so far, so many of the ones we talk to appear to be sketchy, and we're not doing that either. If anyone knows of any non-sketchy, non-awful advertising partners, please let us know. Or, if you happen to have some excess money and want to just sponsor stuff so we don't even have to worry about regular ads, let us know. Assuming most of you are not in that position, we do have a page of various ways individuals can support us. We know that times are tough for many, many people right now, but if you happen to be doing okay, and can help us replace at least a little of what money we made from ads, that would be greatly appreciated.

As we've noted a few times, not much about the Trump administration's ban of TikTok makes coherent sense. Most of the biggest TikTok pearl clutchers in the GOP and Trump administration have actively opposed things like basic US privacy laws or even improving election security, and were utterly absent from efforts to shore up other privacy and problems, be it the abuse of cellular location data or our poorly secured telecom infrastructure. It's a bunch of xenophobia, pearl clutching, and performative politics dressed up as serious adult policy that doesn't even get close to fixing any actual problems.And yet, many reporters and internet experts keep parroting the idea that banning TikTok somehow "protects U.S. consumers" or "prevents the Chinese government from obtaining U.S. consumer data." You're to ignore that Americans install millions of Chinese-made "smart" TVs, fridges, and poorly secured IOT gadgets on home and business networks with reckless abandon. Or that international corporations not only sell access to consumer data to any nitwit with a nickel, they often leave it unencrypted in the cloud. Or that the U.S. has no privacy law for the internet era, and corporations routinely see performative wrist slaps for privacy and security incompetence.The idea that Chinese intelligence, with zero scruples and an unlimited budget, "needs" TikTok access to spy on Americans' data in this environment is just silly nonsense. Any yet, here we are.It's all even more absurd when you consider the scope and complexity of global adtech markets. As Gizmodo's Shoshana Wodinsky recently explored, international adtech is a complex, unaccountable monster. This orgy of consumer tracking, behavioral data, and "anonymized" (read: not actually anonymous at all) datasets is so complex, even folks that cover the sector have a hard time understanding it. Thinking we can control what data the Chinese government is gleaning from this tangled web -- or that even selling TikTok to Microsoft somehow "fixes" anything -- is an act of hubris in full context:

Georgia governor Brian Kemp -- last seen here trying to turn his own election security problems into a Democrat-lead conspiracy -- has just proven he's unable to read the room. The governor can't read the room in his own state, much less the current state of the nation. Less than a month after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered nationwide protests against police violence, officers in Atlanta were involved in a controversial killing of a Black man in a fast food restaurant parking lot.The state of the nation is pretty much the same as it is in Georgia. Now is not the time to be offering police officers even more legal protections, considering how much they've abused the ones they already have. Idiotic bills touted by legislators saying stupid things like "blue lives matter" come and go. Mostly they go, since they're either redundant or unworkable. These laws try to turn a person's career choice into an immutable characteristic, converting some of the most powerful people in the nation into a class that deserves protection from the public these officers are sworn to serve.It's now possible to commit a hate crime against a cop in Georgia, thanks to Kemp and his party-line voters.